Issue 7, 2016

A fragment merging approach towards the development of small molecule inhibitors of Mycobacterium tuberculosis EthR for use as ethionamide boosters

Abstract

With the ever-increasing instances of resistance to frontline TB drugs there is the need to develop novel strategies to fight the worldwide TB epidemic. Boosting the effect of the existing second-line antibiotic ethionamide by inhibiting the mycobacterial transcriptional repressor protein EthR is an attractive therapeutic strategy. Herein we report the use of a fragment based drug discovery approach for the structure-guided systematic merging of two fragment molecules, each binding twice to the hydrophobic cavity of EthR from M. tuberculosis. These together fill the entire binding pocket of EthR. We elaborated these fragment hits and developed small molecule inhibitors which have a 100-fold improvement of potency in vitro over the initial fragments.

Graphical abstract: A fragment merging approach towards the development of small molecule inhibitors of Mycobacterium tuberculosis EthR for use as ethionamide boosters

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
22 12 2015
Accepted
18 1 2016
First published
18 1 2016
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

Org. Biomol. Chem., 2016,14, 2318-2326

A fragment merging approach towards the development of small molecule inhibitors of Mycobacterium tuberculosis EthR for use as ethionamide boosters

P. O. Nikiforov, S. Surade, M. Blaszczyk, V. Delorme, P. Brodin, A. R. Baulard, T. L. Blundell and C. Abell, Org. Biomol. Chem., 2016, 14, 2318 DOI: 10.1039/C5OB02630J

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